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With only two days remaining before Emily and Daniel say "I do," it's time for Revenge to start milking the rising tensions. Unfortunately, those tensions are about turgid as cooked spaghetti.
Of course, in backwards fashion, first comes love, then comes baby… that secures marriage; Daniel, however, isn't so keen on spreading the word about the bundle of joy. He keeps it out of his and Emily's Voulez profile as she feigns excitement over telling the world. Later, Daniel tells Sarah – who he still hasn't broken up with – that he just needs the engagement story to sell magazines. Small problem with that lie: the magazine hasn't even gone to print and the wedding is in two days, so by that logic he'd have to marry Emily and divorce her after the issue in order to be with Sarah. Sarah sees the flaws in this plan and jets.
At Grayson Manor, Lydia gives Emily a completely ridiculous push down the entryway stairs (with two witnesses, mind you) because slapping is just so cliché. Daniel rushes to Emily's side and announces that she's pregnant, which throws Victoria into conspiracy theory mode. This makes it easy to accuse V of sending the paparazzi after Emily at the OB/GYN, which also conveniently prevents Em from having to prove that she's pregnant and sets up a fight in which Daniel tells Victoria he's definitely marrying her arch-enemy. (Also: helpful for accusing Victoria of murder later.)
While all that is helping Em tie her plan up with a bow, Lydia is sewing seeds everywhere. Margaux wants secondary sources to corroborate Lydia's Conrad story (because M is a responsible journalist who doesn't take a solo, well-placed source's word as gospel), so she tries to trap Conrad into confessing on tape. It's a no-go and Aidan squeals to Margaux, who drops Lydia. With nowhere to live, Lydia tells Conrad she loves him, consummates the lie, and then sets up shop just in time for Conrad to wave a present under her nose. He brings out old photo albums to inspire his memoir and, in them, Lydia finds the photo of Emily as a cater waiter from a 2003 New Year's Eve party that Nolan once worked to destroy. Emily's secret identity may not be so safe and it's starting to make sense that someone will feel the need to shoot her on her wedding night.
That person won't likely be Charlotte, who's vowed to stop scheming after seeing what her little game did to Daniel. The poor guy loves Emily and Sarah and when Charlotte finds him running his favorite trail, he tells her how awful it is that he ran into Sarah right as everything in his life was perfect. The solution: Charlotte buys Emily a spa day and tells Victoria she's out.
, Margaux winds up dropping her Conrad story completely when Nolan tells her Jack is involved; Jack tells her what Conrad did and that she might be in danger too, and she agrees he's more important than a story. Aww.
Another (sort of) aww moment comes courtesy of Aidan, who proposes to Emily the night before her wedding, though it's looking like they might not be able to spend happily ever after together as planned.
And by episode's end, everything is infuriatingly perfect. Daniel returns to Em and tells her he broke it off with Sarah – moments before, he was dropping Sarah's necklace into the ocean like the old lady at the end of Titanic – and that they will be each other's rocks. Surely something is about to barge onto Emily's porch of doom and ruin everything.
Instead we get the prospect of Fumbles McGee (er, Lydia) using that catering photo to ruin Emily and a visit from Victoria, who says she won't attending Daniel's wedding. Oh no? The second danger is presumably a problem because it will be easier for V to give herself an alibi when Emily "dies," but that's not some unsolvable problem worthy of a sadistically soapy series like Revenge. Where do we file complaints about missing cliffhangers, ABC?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We open on a bridal photo shoot for the supposedly cutting edge, vibrant magazine Voulez for which Emily is trying on various gowns and posing for wedding photos that look like they belong in a Sears catalog. Daniel and Emily don’t seem to notice because they’re too busy not telling people Emily is "pregnant," per Daniel’s request. Emily feigns her bursting excitement, but Daniel seems unmoved by her performance for once in his life.
At that moment, Margaux is helping Lydia settle into her lush accommodations, but says she’s not running with the story Lydia told her until she’s got some secondary sources. You know, because Margaux is a responsible journalist who checks sources but has no qualms about paying off a source with a fancy hotel. (She didn’t give Lydia the diamonds she asked for, so she’s definitely exhibiting some restraint, right?) Lydia seems blindsided by this because she was apparently never required to read about Woodward and Bernstein’s contribution to American history.
And now that Victoria is certain her plan to break up Emily and Daniel is a done deal, it’s starting to unravel because Sarah is upset that Daniel is ignoring her. (You shoulda known, V.) The poor, emotionally abused dummy won’t break up with Sarah, even though Emily is "pregnant" and he probably should. Of course his reason for keeping the engagement going is that he needs to sell magazines. This logic is flawed because the wedding is in two days and the magazine doesn’t seem to have gone to print. Was he going to marry Emily and then divorce her once the magazine came out? And is he really so famous that his mug is the thing selling magazines? Sarah sees at least one of these problems and jets.
Despite what she thinks is an imminent victory, Victoria is still trying to get under Emily’s skin by commenting on her willingness to stay with Daniel after he cheated on her. Emily came prepared and drops pregnancy hints like Easter eggs all over her breakfast nook. That battle doesn’t last long because Emily notices clothes falling from Victoria’s balcony -- it’s Lydia, who’s having a Gatsby moment with her nemesis’ clothing while stealing an Emerald shift dress.
Naturally, we’re in for a classic Victoria snark-off. Lydia declares war on Victoria, but we’re sort of with Madame Grayson on this one: She did save Lydia from dying in a fiery plane crash. So what if she also banished her to serve drinks to tourists in Ecuador? That sounds like a pretty sweet gig that lets you get a tan in a place where you probably won’t be pushed off the balcony of a Manhattan apartment building. Of course, Lydia is upset that she was banished while Victoria played "the Queen of New York." Let’s see, dying much like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark (only with more debris), or hanging out in Ecuador away from people who kill each other over real estate and ego? Yeah, still not catching the part where Victoria’s deal to save her life was a bad thing.
But Lydia’s not quite done. As she leaves, she tells Emily that she knows her secret (she knows something is up because she’s seen the image of Emily as a cater waiter back in 2003) and then actually pushes Ems down the two steps in the entryway. You know, because slapping is just too dramatic. Emily falls backward onto the marble floor and Daniel rushes to her side. Victoria learns right then and there that Ems is pregnant and naturally thinks this is a lie. (And as far as we know, she’s right.)
Thanks to Lydia, Margaux’s got a deal of her own brewing: she is planning on using her unproven Grayson story to make Voulez turn a profit two years before her father’s version of the magazine did. She’s already secured the backers, which means this story is definitely going to fall apart. What’s more is that Jack is still hoping to stop her from pursuing the story because he fears it will get her killed-- a fear that’s not unfounded.
Charlotte finds herself experiencing something like fear when Sarah quits at the Stowaway because she doesn’t want to break up Daniel’s marriage. Charlotte says she’ll give Daniel the right push and finds him running where he always does when he’s frustrated. Unfortunately, while her chat is meant to inspire a moment of sudden understanding in Daniel, steering him towards his true love Sarah, it turns out that Daniel loves them both and that seeing Sarah again has turned his life into a hell zone. He says that if Sarah had never come back into his life, everything would be perfect. That’s Charlotte’s cue to feel guilt and make amends by giving a phantom apology to Emily along with the hug Emily’s always wanted from her half-sister and a mani-pedi.
Jack clearly doesn’t share Charlotte’s desire to clean up his act, as he asks Nolan to use his tech skills to pull a sneak attack against Margaux to keep her off Conrad’s trail. Nolan suggests that he just tell Margaux the truth (I’m sorry, but the people of Revenge can’t comprehend such ideas), but Jack says she’s a journalist and she’d just use him as a source. I can’t tell if he’s calling her a tough-as-nails journalist or seriously underestimating her ability to feel compassion. Let’s go with the latter.
The scarier media, the paparazzi, somehow find Daniel and Emily at the OB-GYN and they both decry that the tip must have come from Victoria (even though the rest of us are probably thinking it was Emily so she wouldn’t have to prove to a doctor that she was pregnant). Daniel marches right over to see Victoria who unleashes her theory that Emily’s lying about the pregnancy to trap him now that she knows about Sarah. He’s genuinely upset that Victoria’s truth bomb (and her proclivity for calling his relationship a "loveless marriage") has hurt Emily and it’s enough to make him furious, declaring that Victoria has lost and he’s marrying Emily. Two birds (Sarah, and Victoria’s motive for killing Emily), one stone.
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Unlike Victoria, Conrad tends not question anything as he should. When he heads to a Manhattan hotel under the guise of being interviewed by Time Magazine, it turns out it was Lydia faking the whole thing. Dressed in one of Victoria’s dresses, she tries to incite a confession from him as he does everything in his power to convey his desire to get hot and sweaty with her, just like old times. Realizing that she’s not going to get what she needs from him, she sends him away and stares at her useless audio recorder wistfully.
At that exact moment, Aidan calls Margaux pretending to be someone from the hotel and notifies her that Conrad Grayson visited Lydia. Just like that, Lydia is dropped from Margaux’s story because she clearly can’t be trusted and Lydia seems downright despondent. Then again, the woman is back from "the dead," so she’ll figure something out… something like hopping right back into Conrad’s comfortable, money-lined bed so she can have a vantage point on whatever trouble she manages to cook up. Cheap, but smart, little ghost woman.
While two of the worst people on this show do the nasty, Daniel is busy breaking Sarah’s heart. She’s furious that he didn’t tell her Emily was pregnant, but he explains that his feelings came back when he saw her in the bakery but that they both know what it’s like to raise a baby in a broken home. She can’t make a plea, because she really does get it and she doesn’t want to condemn Daniel’s child to the same fate. And so, rather bluntly, Sarah cries a few tears, hands him the necklace he gave her and drops it into the ocean like the old lady at the end of Titanic. Because while he’ll marry Emily, his heart will forever be singing a Celine Dion ballad from 1997 for Sarah.
Little does he know that Emily’s heart has gone on (and on until the break of dawn) for Aidan this whole time, which basically makes her a pretty terrible person. What has really done to deserve this aside from being born – unwillingly -- to two terrible parents? Still, we’re meant to coo like merry little pigeons when Aidan turns their battle ritual into a candlelit marriage proposal which Emily readily accepts with a kiss in front of giant windows that (again) no one manages to walk in on. As they lay in post-coital bliss afterward, they giggle over Nolan giving Emily the surname Ross so he could visit her without suspicion before putting great emphasis on this being their one final night before total bliss. And all that emphasis only emphasizes the fact that this is all going to go terribly wrong.
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It becomes apparent that Nolan’s visit to Margaux’s office earlier in the episode was an errand on Jack’s behalf. He told the Voulez editor that Jack knows information about Conrad so that Jack would be forced to deal with his meddling girlfriend the right way instead of Scooby Doo-ing his way to a break up. She stops by the Stowaway and when Jack tells her that Conrad-- the man she’s known since she was a child-- killed his wife and ruined much of his life, she’s taken aback. And when he says that he’s worried about Margaux getting killed for digging, she uses that heart he wasn’t sure she had and drops the story for him. And yeah, shippers, they kissed.
More kisses abound when Daniel prepares to leave Emily’s house for the night before the wedding. He’s concerned that she hasn’t brought up Sarah and her only concern is whether or not he’s ended it. He says he has and tells her, with as much feeling as he can muster after letting Sarah go, that Emily is the only one he wants. This poor guy. Emily lies right back to him and they agree to be there for each other and for the baby… who will never come.
While there will be no bundle of joy, there will be gifts of another sort. In Conrad’s bedroom are troves of family photo albums meant to jog Conrad’s memory for his memoirs (wait, isn’t the point that his life is interesting he already has those memories?). Lydia shoots her hand into the first box she finds and pulls out the correct photo album -- from the 2003 party Emily catered -- and thumbs right to the photo that Nolan once destroyed. She’s got evidence against Ms. Thorne once again. Of course, it’s not certain that Fumbles McGee (that’s Lydia, duh) won’t lose her shot again, but it’s certainly not comforting.
Then comes the grand cliff-hanger finale. Victoria visits Emily’s porch of perpetual bad news to decline the invitation to her wedding. This is our big shocker, even though, honestly it doesn’t seem to be all that much of a problem. Emily already planted a bracelet with gun residue in Victoria’s closet and while Victoria won’t attend, she certainly won’t go far. The prospect of seeing Emily upset is simply too great. So what if she’s not sitting in white chair on a manicured lawn? She’ll be around. Plus, in the previews for week, it’s clear that Victoria makes it to the wedding, that Emily shoots fake shots in the air, and that, apparently, someone else ends up pulling the trigger when Ems finally takes her blood plunge. It’s hardly a "Where could they possibly go from here?" sort of ending, but I suppose that’s what winter finales are for.
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